“Then never mind that. I’ll rub liniment into your poor bruised body.Thatwill relax you.” She heard his indrawn breath as she laid a hand lightly on him.
Both his eyes were open now and shining. “You don’t have any liniment… and I don’t have any bruises.”
“Quibbler!” Then, as though willing to concede a point, she said, “Well, perhaps not bruises.” Her hands slid lower, and her voice was ingenuous and husky as she said, “Swellings.”
A laugh, a breath, taken quickly. “My love, my own sweet love… my lily petal. I’m too damned weak.”
“As though I care for that,” she scoffed cheerfully. “I mean to ravish you. You’ll find I don’t share your scruples. It should be a good lesson to you.”
As she carefully removed the pillow from under his head and laid him back, eddying her parted lips over his mouth, he said, in fervent agreement, “God, yes.” Then when her hand began to coast down over his body: “I’m beginning to think you should have no mercy.” He took another hard breath as her fingers wandered over the rise of his thigh. She could feel his flesh heat under her cheek and the crooked curve of his smile. “I don’t know how it comes to be, but I’m feeling stronger by the minute.”
She sighed, trailing the tip of her tongue over his lips. “Men are so easy.”
Meeting her tongue, moving his lips against hers, he said, “Flammableis the word. Please, if you intend to assert your conjugal rights, carry on. Although—and I’m sorry about this—the way Cat’s bound my arm, I don’t think my shirt will come off.”
But this morning she had tucked a small knife from her breakfast tray into her garter, and her shifting skirts twisted it against her stockings, reminding her of its presence. A gleam of humor lit her eyes. “What I have under my skirt may change your mind.”
He watched appreciatively as she sat back on her heels and began to draw up her hem. “It may.” His gaze widened lazily as he saw a small knife with a mother-of-pearl handle under the gold Brussels lace garter that circled her slim thigh.
“I come equipped with the necessities.” Her breathless voice tried to sound informative.
There was an oddly disquieting smile in his eyes. “Every last one. And now?”
“You’re such an unsuccessful ravisher, I’m going to show you how it ought to be done.” A series of jabbing slashes opened his remaining buttons, laying his midriff bare.
Laughing, flinching as the inexpertly wielded blade skimmed his flesh, he said, “I suppose I’ll have to make my way mother-naked back to Teasel Hill?”
“We pirates never trouble ourselves about whether our victims have a change of clothing. Revenge issweet. How do you like this?”
“If I told you, love, it might ruin your revenge,” he said huskily, lifting a knee to kick off the bedclothes. “Now what? Trouble?”
“Yes.” She was sawing at the seam over his shoulder. “It’s hard work being a swashbuckler. How do you ravishers always make this look so easy?”
He had brought up a hand to brush the back of his forefinger over her nipple, feeling a nerve-shiver run through him as it hardened against his skin. Sympathetically he said, “For one thing, we don’t use dining utensils.”
She had to gasp a little as his hand curved up and into her low-cut bodice, pressing under the warm thrust of her breast, caressing the nipple with his thumb. Feebly she murmured, “When one dines, one uses the proper utensils.”
He slid her closer, freeing her breast from its aching confinement, and applied his lips and tongue to the tip. “Then I think I may come by my just deserts.”
Her laughter was a sensual stroke on his brow. “I think, love, that your desserts have just begun.”
When Cat returned much later to check on his patient, he found Devon asleep in a bed littered with the scattered tattersof his clothing and Merry’s nose peeking out of the bedclothes, her eyes deliciously alight with amusement. And seeing the answering humor in his pale-blue gaze and questioningly upraised brow, she whispered, “Give me your hand,” and slapped the knife into it. “There wasn’t a bit of fight in the lad.”
Chapter 32
October brought the return migration of winter birds to England. Though they were often unseen, Merry could hear the shrill, undulating calls of geese as they passed overhead at night. Nutters rustled in the woods under turning leaves. The elms were a bright umber, and the Spanish chestnuts reared great golden boughs among glowing brown beeches and the russet flutter of oak leaves. Hedgerows sparkled with holly berries and the deep shimmer of luxuriant blackberries. Children sailed kites in the open fields.
Rand Morgan broke his overland journey to meet theBlack Joke,again docked in Falmouth harbor, by spending a day with his grandmother at St. Cyr. In the late afternoon he returned to the Gentle Shepherd, bending his head to avoid the low hang of an alder branch as he came from a lane into the side yard of the coaching inn where the cider mill, the apple baskets, the vats, and the horsehair cloths were out and ready for an evening’s apple cidering. He dismounted, tossed the reins to a groom, made his way upstairs to the comfortable parlor adjoining his bedchamber, and by the time he was joined by Sails, hadsettled into a chair, a handsomely proportioned leg in a dusty riding boot slung casually over one arm. He had a hookah at one elbow and a pitcher of beer at the other.
Lifting his glass to the sailmaker in a negligent salute, he quoted the sign exhibited in the alehouse below: “ ‘Drink here. The best beare.’ Shall I give you a glass?”
“Aye,” said the old man, smiling slightly, and took it from Morgan’s hand, making himself comfortable in a woolen upholstered chair by the fire. While the captain was busy at St. Cyr, Sails had hired a gig to drive over for a look at Stonehenge, though little enough pleasure he’d been able to take in the place, because almost on arrival he’d fallen in with an elderly widower from Swindon who held sternly to the position that Avebury was by far the superior ancient monument, and went on at such length about the injustice of a fate that made Stonehenge better known, and spent such energy in detailing what he saw to be the many shortcomings of Stonehenge that Sails felt almost as though he’d been guilty of an act of ignominy by going there to begin with.
When Morgan asked Sails how he’d found Stonehenge, Sails answered rather forlornly that it wasn’t the equal of Avebury. Considerably intrigued, because Sails had set out that morning in the best of spirits, Morgan soon had the story out of him, and before long Sails began to see the absurdity of the situation and was laughing and slapping his thigh over Morgan’s pungent comments.
Plying his handkerchief against the moist amusement in his eyes, chuckling faintly, Sails allowed the pirate captain to refill his glass before he said, “How did ye find the duchess, your grandmama?”
Morgan inhaled a rose of blue smoke, stretching his arm along the chair back. “Brimming with sentiment. At luncheon she wept over having destroyed the letter Grandfather Morgan wrote to Jasper informing him of my upcoming birth. Do you know, she went so far as to say I would havebeen a—What was her word?Magnificent,I believe. I would have been a magnificent duke.”
